


Just Milk

by sapphire_child



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Community: then_theres_us, Community: womenlovefest, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Ficathon, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Gen, Healing, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-11
Updated: 2011-09-11
Packaged: 2019-01-27 23:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12593012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire_child/pseuds/sapphire_child
Summary: It tends to creep up on him you see, now that he doesn’t sleep much anymore. Not that he was ever big on the activity in the first place, but now when he lets himself...well he tends to wake up like this. Screaming that is.





	Just Milk

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the TTU ficathon and also in honour of [](http://womenlovefest.livejournal.com/profile)[**womenlovefest**](http://womenlovefest.livejournal.com/) which is being fabulously run by my good friend [](http://akzseinga.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://akzseinga.livejournal.com/)**akzseinga**

He wakes up in the console room.

He’d been waiting for Rose to come back from dinner with her mother. Shepherd’s Pie. Or sausage and mash maybe. Nothing special but he refused it all the same. In any case, he’d been waiting for her and obviously fallen asleep somehow along the way. Boredom probably. Or maybe just plain exhaustion.

It tends to creep up on him you see, now that he doesn’t sleep much anymore. Not that he was ever big on the activity in the first place, but now when he lets himself...well he tends to wake up like this. Screaming that is. Shouting out loud and trying to escape from the imagined stench of a million burning bodies.

And it isn’t the console room that he sees when he gets like this – it’s the burning spires of his dreamscape. The memories he has of it, that all consuming fire...it’s enough to make the last puff of air in him escape his lips in a wordless cry. The nightmarish screams of his subconscious block out even the comforting hum of his TARDIS and a burnt out fuse under the console is substitute for the bitter smell of singed flesh and glass shattering from the heat. Overwhelmed, he pushes his way out of the box, panting and panicking like the hounds of hell are on his heels.

He rarely sleeps and so even rarer is this. This lack of control, the panic. The moment between sleep and awake where he can hear the pounding of his hearts in his ears and he becomes so disorientated by the horror of his own memories that he can’t keep the world around him straight.

And then something permeates his panicked mind. A sound. Just a small piece of aural information really, but it takes a very long moment before he can identify it through the filters of his battered mind.

Laughter.

He stops dead and looks up, up, up...and there is Rose. Not doing anything special. She’s just out on the balcony making a phone call. Getting some air maybe. Her hair is golden bright in the artificial light from the fluoro’s and she’s leaning, almost dreamily, against the ugly concrete balustrade. As he watches her she laughs again at whoever she’s talking to. Warmth, relief floods him at the sound – drives away the cold and the hurt and the vice-like squeeze of memory. His fear dies away, the panic dulls.

He breathes again.

And then she sees him watching her. She brightens, straightening up and waving to make sure she’s got his full attention before beckoning to him.

“Come up!” she mouths.

He doesn’t need to be asked twice.

Rose has finished her call by the time she meets him at the stairs. She reaches for his hand and helps him up the last few and then they’re side by side and hand in hand and walking and it feels so much better to just be _moving_...

“You get bored?” Rose teases, bumping him gently with her shoulder and then laying her head against his collarbone briefly. It’s almost like an embrace. And oddly comforting at that, though he’s still far from being alright.

“Somethin’ like that.” he mumbles and she looks up, eyes flickering with concern. But Rose, being Rose, she doesn’t even mention how hoarse he sounds or how hollow his eyes look.

“Tea?” she offers, but it’s more a command than an invitation judging by the way she’s already getting her keys out.

“Coffee?” he counters hopefully as she unlocks the door and tugs him inside with her.

“Just milk yeah?” she affirms, absently, over her shoulder. And as he stands on the threshold of her mother’s too-small flat, the Doctor’s gratitude for her and everything she is to him is so all consuming, so overwhelming...

“Just milk.” He repeats thickly, and the door snicks shut behind him.


End file.
